There are ever increasing numbers of devices within the home, office buildings or the outdoor environment that have processing and communication capabilities which allow such devices to interact with other processing devices and cloud services. Everyday objects and relatively small-scale processing devices may be connected to each other and to central platforms as part of the “Internet of Things” (IoT). For example, a heating system in the home may gather information from various temperature sensors and control the activation of heaters based on the gathered information; a factory pollution monitoring sensor may gather information from various chemical sensors and arrange maintenance based on the gathered information; whilst a healthcare provider may use wireless sensors, such as a heart rate monitor to track the health of patients while they are at home. In the cases described above, the data is generally forwarded to a cloud service on the internet.
Such IoT devices tend to be wireless and battery-operated, as wired devices are expensive to install and may not be scalable. The lifetime of battery-powered devices may be sufficiently long for their required purpose, and some may be wirelessly chargeable. However, a malicious attack on an IoT device could significantly or entirely drain the device battery, such that, for example, a device lifetime of ten years is reduced to half a day. This vulnerability may make battery-powered IoT devices expensive and undesirable.
The present disclosure broadly provides technologies to improve the security and operational lifetime of devices.